This latest moon has been dancing around for over a century currently. Its orbit is extremely elliptical, moving it to go a wee bit off tangent—between 38 and 100 times the distance of Earth’s primary moon—and bob up and down across Earth’s orbital plane. This new moon is skewed by about 8° and it orbits the Sun for 365.93 days, which is a little longer than-Earth’s 365.24 day-long year.
NASA said:
Since it’s tilted and has an indirect orbit, sometimes it is
quite closer to the Sun and moving a little quicker than Earth. Other times, it is a little bit farther out and moving a bit extra slowly, however it never gets any closer than about 14 million kilometers from Planet Earth or farther than about 40 million kilometers.
According to NASA, it’s better than 36.5 meters across, but no more than 91 meters wide, and will circle earth for many extra centuries to come.
1 comments:
Click here for commentsAny idea what the "new" moon really looks like? The graphic with the article appears to contain a picture of Mimas one of Saturn's Moons, not the alleged moon circling Earth. With it being a relatively small asteroid in comparison to the size of our Moon, I assume it probably looks more like a blob of "Play-Doh".
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